The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program that allow the presentation of programs (or content) on television broadcast receivers or storage-type television receivers in an optimum sequence in accordance with the date and time at which each user actually views the content and allows the user to efficiently extract desired content from among many pieces of content.
The content that is provided by television is viewed in two ways; viewing live broadcast being received on a television broadcast receiver and receiving television airwave at the receiver, storing the received content in data storage media such as hard disk drive or DVD, and selecting desired pieces of contents by the user from the stored data for viewing.
The recent rapid progress in communication infrastructure allows the user as a content viewer to receive and view huge amounts of content seldom seen in the past, such as satellite broadcasts transmitted via ground wave and satellite broadcasting like CS and BS as well as the Internet. However, the existence itself of such huge amounts of content presents problems of pushing up the load of content selection and channel selection for example for user.
In viewing live broadcasting with a television broadcast receiver, the user selects a desired channel and views the selected channel. This method is enough if there are only a small number of channels. However, as the number of channels increase, the number of operations that the user must perform for channel selection increases. The current situation where there are several tens to several hundred channels available makes it difficult for the user to quickly search for desired channels.
With television broadcast receivers in related art, once the user selects and sets a channel to be viewed, the receiver subsequently continues to display the selected channel until the user performs a new channel switching operation. Therefore, if the user wants to view another channel, it requires a troublesome operation of searching for the desired channel from among a huge amount of channels.
Further, in the case of viewing recorded content by use of a storage-type television apparatus having data storage means such as DVD or hard disk drive, it is a general practice for the user to display a recording list made up of program information such as broadcast program information (or EPG (Electronic Program Guide)) that is recorded by each storage-type television apparatus along with television programs, select desired recorded content from the display program list, and view the selected content.
This approach also requires the user to search for desired recorded content from a recording list for selection. Recent recording devices such as hard disk drive and DVD for example are capable of recording content for several hundred hours, thereby recording huge amounts of content on DVDs and other storage media. Consequently, like the above-mentioned channel selection, the user must perform again the processing of extracting desired content from a recorded content list having a great number of pieces of content. As the number of pieces of content increases, the user load also increases.
With these storage-type television broadcast receivers, it is also necessary for the user, in order to view another piece of content immediately after viewing the current one, to perform again the processing of searching for the desired piece of content and selecting the retrieved content. That is, the user must perform the selection of content from a list every time content reproduction is executed.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, a system has been proposed in which, when the reproduction of once piece of content ends, a list is set in the order of newer content, older content, content names, or unviewed content for example, thereby reproducing content one after the other in the specified order. However, this approach cannot always reproduce content in the order desired by the user because the order in which content is reproduced is based on simple rules.
Another method has been proposed in which received content or recorded content is controlled on the basis of user preference. For example, patent document 1 discloses a configuration in which program preference is computed on the basis of user's program viewing log data and content reception or content recording is controlled on the basis of the computed preference. Patent document 2 discloses a configuration of transmitting a list of broadcast-scheduled content from a server to various users in which the preference of each user is determined on the basis of the past program viewing status and recording status at each user terminal and a program list corresponding to the determined preference is provided.
The above-mentioned related-art techniques execute the processing by determining user preference in a uniform manner. However, user preferences change from time to time. For example, programs that the user wants to view on Sunday afternoon may often differ in kind from those to view weekday night. Many users want to view news programs on weekday evening but dramas on Saturday night and entertainments on Sunday afternoon, for example. Thus, the content that each user feels like viewing changes depending on days of the week and time zones, for example.
Related-art techniques propose a variety of configurations for executing channel control and recording control on the basis of user preference, but do not disclose any configurations that execute content control or list control by considering the timing of actual viewing by the user of content.
[Patent document 1]    Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-23589
[Patent document 2]    Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-114903